Public Exhibition to explore people-based urban transformation in Cape Town

Categories: HEADLINES, Arts & Culture

Explored from high-level planning to street-level conversations

The Cape Town Partnership may have been founded around the regeneration of the built fabric of Cape Town’s city centre, but it is to the idea of cities as places of “concentrated humanity” that the organisation now turns with an exhibition of its work over the past year.

Between Wednesday 6th and Monday 12th November (09h00-17h00 Monday-Saturday, 12h00-17h00 Sunday), the organisation will exhibit People Make Places: A journey through the work of the Cape Town Partnership, at 6 Spin Street in the CBD. The exhibition explores the Partnership’s work, from high-level planning and policy to community interactions and street-level conversations, and will be accompanied by a series of walking tours that will take interested parties on a journey through some of the projects, places and processes in which the Partnership is involved. Instead of an annual report, the organisation will be publishing a mapped guide to its projects and approach, paired with personal accounts from some of the people involved.

The Cape Town Partnership’s extended geographical mandate (now including the Table Bay precinct, which stretches from Camps Bay to the Foreshore, the east city to Observatory, Salt River to Langa – with links across the Cape Town metropole) will be reflected in the story, as will the arrival of its new community paper, Molo.

Says Cape Town Partnership CEO, Bulelwa Makalima-Ngewana; “The time came for our AGM and we wanted to do something that reflected the shift in our work in the last year – to being about putting people first. It had to be more accessible and cost-effective than the usual private stakeholder function AGMs are known to be. Our focus is on all the people who make up the story of Cape Town and this exhibition is about opening up our work to them, asking for their input, and inviting them to get involved.”

Professor Njabulo Ndebele, Chairperson of the Board of the Cape Town Partnership adds; “As this city evolves, we are constantly grappling with the idea of African liveability; what is it to live a life in an urban African context? We need an identity that goes beyond the European idea of liveability. With this exhibition we are hoping to show the connections between new ideas and action as we travel this collective path of creating a better Cape Town for all people.”

The exhibition is a pilot of one of the Cape Town Partnership’s shortlisted World Design Capital projects – an interactive exhibition on the Central City Development Strategy (a ten-year development plan for the central city area, that is shared with the City of Cape Town) with the aim of hosting a bigger exhibition as part of the World Design Capital 2014 calendar.